


despite your destination

by dollylux



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Indrid Deserves Everything Dot Pizza, M/M, Nostalgia, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-16
Updated: 2019-08-16
Packaged: 2020-09-02 08:09:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20272714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollylux/pseuds/dollylux
Summary: Indrid and Duck being simple and sweet and honest under the stars.





	despite your destination

**Author's Note:**

> I just have these moments where I ache for Indrid and the loneliness of his existence. I just wanted to give him this, I guess. ♥

“You cold?”

Indrid smiles.

“It’s in the name,” he replies.

Duck gives him a wry smile and wraps Indrid up in yet another blanket, leaving him in his trusty baja hoodie, a relic left over from his youth that he only drags out when the weather gets chilly. Indrid burrows down in his shell of blankets and shivers, but his face is open, his smile content.

This had been his idea, after all. 

“We don’t gotta be here,” Duck says for the tenth time. It’s a clear night, and even with only a sliver of the nearly new moon, the stars light up the sky, letting Duck see Indrid beside him. “We can go back to my place. I got that new heater off Amazon we talked about. It’s supposed to--”

“I want to be here, Duck,” Indrid says.

They’re laying on their sides in the bed of a borrowed truck, parked near to dead center of a field that Duck used to haunt back in high school. They’d just called it ‘the field,’ but it was more than that. It was a party place, it was a place to be alone, it was a place to make quick, fumbling love before curfew. It was theirs, and now, tonight, it belongs to him and Indrid.

When Indrid had asked where Duck had spent most of his time in high school, the truthful answer had been in his room, on his Sega, but they’d moved out of that house a long time ago. It belongs to a new family now, a nuclear family with a dog who probably didn’t have one whole destiny among them. So, the field had been the next best thing.

He turns the small portable heater he’d brought along up, making sure it faces Indrid.

“You look so pretty under the stars. I ever tell you that?”

Indrid’s smile is indulgent and sweet. He shifts under his nest of blankets and moves closer, so he and Duck are sharing the same lumpy pillow, so that Duck can feel the soft flow of his breath on his face. His glasses are perched on his head, and the sight of Indrid’s dark fire eyes, even unlit, is breathtaking.

“Thank you for bringing me here. For all of today, really. I loved seeing where you came from.”

“You’ve been in Kepler for years. There ain’t much to see, as you well know.” He’s being difficult, but only because he loves the way Indrid looks when he’s the tiniest bit exasperated.

“I meant, seeing _your_ Kepler. What it is for you. The landmarks that have special meaning to you. Places that have made you who you are.”

“That Slush Puppy machine in the gas station really did shape me. I mean, I’m practically blue raspberry all the way down.”

“You’re impossible,” Indrid declares, but he’s grinning when Duck leans in to kiss him. His smile tastes like the Oreo flavored creamer he’d dumped into the coffee Duck handed him earlier. Duck wraps an arm around the Indrid shaped cocoon his boyfriend currently is and pulls him closer. Indrid is currently occupied by leaving innumerable, soft kisses on Duck’s mouth and chin, and Duck doesn’t stir in fear of interrupting.

They settle again, and Indrid’s mouth is fuller, softened by kisses. Peeks of shock white hair fall along his cheekbone, and Duck ventures a hand into the blankets to tuck them back behind his ear.

“I wish I could see where you came from. Where you grew up and the places you used to love. Meet your friends.”

He doesn’t mention Indrid’s family. He’s never spoken of them, and Duck treasures his own privacy enough to not poke at someone else’s, if they aren’t volunteering. As it is, a faint sadness pulls at Indrid’s face, dampening his smile until it’s gone. Duck keeps his hand on Indrid’s face, cupping his cheek with a warm palm.

“Maybe someday,” Indrid offers quietly.

He doesn’t say anything more for a long moment, and Duck doesn’t disrupt the silence. Theirs isn’t a relationship that needs constant sound, or explicit reassurance. It isn’t easy, but this-- this connection, this tacit understanding-- is effortless.

_Maybe someday I can talk about it,_ is what Duck hears. _Maybe someday, I won’t feel raw at just the thought of my other life._

“It’s strange,” Indrid says after awhile. The barest slice of moon drifts higher overhead. Duck watches its progress. “Growing up in a place where you’re just like everybody else. Nothing special. And then just… not being that. Being everything you weren’t. Or nothing you were.”

It’s very like Indrid, to speak in purple circles when they’re talking like this. It’s his way of thinking, of finding his way to what he truly means. Duck hangs on to every single word.

“Coming here and thinking I understood everything. That I already knew everything there is to know.”  
“Were you scared?” Duck asks, keeping his voice quiet, not upsetting the wavelength of Indrid’s tone, not wanting to spook him into silence. “When you first got here?”

“Terrified,” Indrid replies, so simple and honest that it hits Duck square in the chest. “As you know, there are some similarities between Earth and Sylvain, a lot of which exist because of the intermingling of our planets over the centuries. But there are things about Earth that I hadn’t anticipated. And, you know. The whole… language thing.”

Duck keeps a tight grip on his smile, but he’s sure his eyes are warm as they search Indrid’s.

“They don’t teach English in Sylph grade school?”

“Only the wealthy,” Indrid says with a laugh, as if that were incredibly obvious. “It wasn’t only that I didn’t know the language. It’s that I couldn’t fathom how you communicated. Just… the act of getting a thought out of my head and into something understood by another being. It’s just a process thing. Or maybe it’s a moth thing. I’ve never thought to ask another Sylph about it.”

Duck knew his local history. And he’d casually learned Mothman history along the way, but his need for all knowledge of the legend had grown immeasurably since meeting Indrid. He knew every word, every name, every date. The sightings of Indrid Cold, especially by Derenberger (a man he can’t help but be envious of, in a roundabout kinda way), are burned into his mind.

“Were you lonely?” he asks his boyfriend, the love of his strange life. Duck felt the ache of empathy stretch out in his chest, felt it tighten his throat.

“Very,” Indrid said. He feels so far away now, his gaze as distant as his tone. Duck keeps a hand on him to assure himself Indrid is real, is _here_, with him, against all odds. “It grew into something I could handle over the years. Something I took comfort in, a known quantity. But those first few years were… I have never quite recovered from my painful education then. From all those mistakes.”

He wants to tell Indrid that none of it is his fault, the terror and confusion and tragedy of Point Pleasant, but it’s not his place. It’s not what Indrid wants to hear.

“I hate that you went through all that alone.” His voice is raw, scraping up from his throat. “That you were scared and you were alone. I wish someone’d been there, Indrid. I wish I had been there.”

“But if I’d had you then, I wouldn’t have you now,” Indrid says with a small smile. The words are watery, his eyes glinting with held in tears. “And the now-me is much better. I’m fluent in your language now, for one. And I’ve made up this _beautiful_ form you see before you.”

“It is beautiful,” Duck mumbles, leaning in to catch Indrid’s mouth in a heated but brief kiss.

“I’m also a much better dresser,” Indrid says against his lips, grinning when Duck snorts.

“God help us all,” Duck declares with a dramatic sigh. Indrid reaches out of his blanketed haven and grabs the front of Duck’s hoodie, tugging him closer only to push him away teasingly.

“You shouldn’t have to deal with a mess of a moth who doesn’t even know how to kiss. Trust me. You got the new and improved model.”

“I want any and every version of you, Indrid Cold. Little baby mothboy wearin’ a crazy diaper to awkward teenmoth--”

“Ohmygod,” Indrid groans.

“To the nightmare of Point Pleasant to the prettiest hermit in Kepler. Not one part of you scares me or weirds me out. You know that, right?”

“You don’t have to say this to me.” Indrid sounds fragile, young in a way breaks Duck’s goddamn heart. “And it’s okay if some stuff about me weirds you out. I’m kind of… weird, Duck.”

Another smile, a cruel one directed purely inward. 

“You’re not weird. You’re… you’re sensitive and kind and crazy fuckin’ smart--”

“Just because I can finish a Sudoku puzzle doesn’t mean--”

“--and you’re fucking beautiful mothed or unmothed, and yeah, maybe you’re unique, but not weird in the way you’re sayin’ it. Not in a bad way.”

“Do you know what most people would say if they knew you said that to the Mothman?” Indrid says with a laugh, but he unearths himself from inside his blankets to wraps his arms around Duck’s neck, hugging up close to him. “Thank you. Not… not for saying all that. But for meaning it.”

Indrid’s face is cold where it’s pressed to Duck’s neck, the frozen tip of his nose pressing just beneath his ear to warm up. Duck cups the back of his head with one hand while the other clutches at his back through the layers of blankets. He presses a kiss to Indrid’s temple, to the clean, dark dash of his eyebrow. 

The night slows around them, the moon staying where it is for longer than usual, or so it seems to Duck. They stay just like that, right where they are, and Duck can’t think of a single thing he’s done, in or out of this field, better than this.


End file.
